TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: OCTOBER 1
0331 Alexander the Great decisively shatters King Darius III’s Persian army at Gaugamela (Arbela), in a tactical masterstroke that leaves him master of the Persian Empire.
1688 Prince Willem III of Orange accepts invitation of take up the British crown
1867 Karl Marx publishes “Das Kapital” in Berlin, a description of the capitalist system, its instability and tendency to self-destruction
1878 General Lew Wallace is sworn in as governor of New Mexico Territory. He went on to deal with the Lincoln County War, Billy the Kid and write Ben-Hur. His Civil War heroics earned him the moniker Savior of Cincinnati.
1890 Yosemite National Park is dedicated in California.
1908 Henry Ford introduces the Model T car (costs $825)
1918 World War I: Combined Arab and British force under the Lawrence of Arabia, T. E. Lawrence captures Damascus from the Turks
1919 World Series #16 begins as a best of 9 affair, White Sox intentionally throw this series to satisfy gamblers (The Black Sox Scandal)
1940 Pennsylvania Turnpike, pioneer toll thruway, opens
1949 People’s Republic of china is established
1957 Thalidomide, an anti-nausea drug and sleep-aid, was launched. For about five years it was commonly prescribed to pregnant women as a drug to deal with morning sickness. It was finally withdrawn from the market after it was determined that it caused birth defects.
1960 Nigeria becomes independent from the UK.
1964 The first Free Speech Movement protest erupts spontaneously on the University of California, Berkeley campus; students demanded an end to the ban of on-campus political activities.
1971 First CT or CAT brain scan performed, at Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon, London.
1974 Five Nixon aides–Kenneth Parkinson, Robert Mardian, Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell–go on trial for conspiring to hinder the Watergate investigation.
1984 U.S. Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan announced that he was taking a leave of absence following his indictment on charges of larceny and fraud. He was later acquitted.
1989 Denmark introduces the world’s first “civil union” law granting same-sex couples certain legal rights and responsibilities but stopping short of recognizing same-sex marriages.
1991 U.S. President Bush condemned the military coup in Haiti that removed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power. U.S. economic and military aid was suspended.
1991 The Siege of Dubrovnik began during the Croatian War of Independence. On this day, the Yugoslav People’s Army started its offensive on Dubrovnik.
1995 Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and nine other defendants were convicted in New York of conspiring to attack the U.S. through bombings, kidnappings and assassinations.
2001 San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to ban Internet filters designed to keep pornography away from children at city libraries. The board left the decision up to the Library Commission to decide whether to install filtering software in children’s areas. A federal law in the U.S. mandated the use of the filters.
2005 Suicide bombers strike three restaurants in two tourist areas on the Indonesian island of Bali killing 22.
2013 The United States government stopped all non-essential functions after Congress failed to reach a deal on the budget. The shut down meant that national parks and museums would be closed and hundreds of thousands of workers would not be able to go to work.
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
